Well, here it is 2011 and I as usual totally ignored this site until Michael rediscovered it. I have no idea how he found it. I must have gotten all of a view per month the past year.
Spent my “holiday” helping my brothers, sister and mom to help my dad die at home. While I wouldn’t necessarily recommend it, it certainly was memorable. To say that dying sucks is a huge understatement, especially when done up close and personal like we were doing. To die at home either takes a lot of money to pay a full-time nursing home staff, or three brothers. Mike (different from Michael) has worked at or managed nursing home type places for 30 years, so he knew everything about everything, without which the entire endeavor would have been impossible. I got there about 12 days after Herm fell and broke 5 ribs, and brother John showed up that night. John and I alternated nights sleeping in the bed next to Herm so Mike could sleep, since we were waking him up at night anytime something went wrong anyway. For myself I almost killed Herm one night by accidentally cutting off his oxygen supply for four hours. He kept working harder and harder breathing until I finally realized there wasn’t any noise coming from the canula, woke mike up and got it fixed. In the end, breathing the last 24 hours or so was so much work for him that his body just quit. His right lung was useless and filled with blood from the broken ribs, and eventually the other lung got congested so bad, and he didn’t have the energy to cough it up, that basically he suffocated (or drowned if you will). So Herm being Herm, he died both on mom’s birthday December 26 in Colorado and my anniversary December 27 in Chicago, at 11:35 PM 12/26 Colorado time. But the nurse came out and officially pronounced him dead at 0058 12/27/2010. Interesting also was that one of Herm’s cousins died the afternoon of the 27th, and both obituaries appeared one above the other in Herm’s hometown newspaper.
This whole business was particularly hard on Mike who has been living close to the folks the past 10 years or so, taking care of business and doing any heavy lifting that needed doing. While he did this sort of stuff for years and years, it is a different kind of thing altogether when it’s your dad. Mom sat us all down a week before Herm died (we all thought he would be gone any minute) and told us straight up that no way was she going to let us do this kind of thing when her time comes. A nursing home will have to do for her thank you very much. Indeed it was a very ugly business, but we were all I think (except mom) glad we were able to do it for the old bastard. He really could be a stubborn son of a bitch if he wanted to be.
I was looking at all the pictures we scanned in for after the funeral and I must say he was a lot better looking man than any of us turned out to be I think.
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